‘It’s funny, some of the feedback around the book, even the nice feedback, has been, ‘oh it’s very angry’,” smiles Victoria Smith, author of Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women. “I think one headline said something about the ‘age of rage’. I am angry in the tone of writing it, but I’m not going around being furious all the time, no.”
Hags isn’t an angry book as such, but in questioning the societal devaluing of middle-aged women, Smith has delivered a thought-provoking, timely and, yes, blistering read.
It’s a robust exploration at what she calls older women’s “loss of the Fs that matter most to patriarchy: fertility, femininity, f***ability”. The big question that she poses is, once that ‘currency’ is lost, then what? This loss of status is nothing new, yet at the same time, this newest generation of middle-aged women — Generation Xers — are not ones for being ignored.
“There was a study done at the BBC where it showed that although there’s an imbalance in how male and female people are shown on screen, it’s all loaded onto older women. The older you get, the more women disappear,” says Smith. “We’ve all seen it on the sofas of daytime television — the older man and the younger woman — and that’s just how it is. We constantly want feisty, new young women to kind of sort out what’s going on.”
I tell Smith that as a 40-something reader, I was surprised to find that I was exactly the middle-aged woman she is talking about it. I thought the book would focus on women older then me (Smith herself is 47).
“It’s such a cliché to say it won’t happen to you or you think that middle-aged women are someone else, but yes, you get to a point where you realise, ‘it’s me, how did that happen?’” agrees Smith.
Generation X women (born between 1965 and 1980), have had a singular journey against many different waves and flashpoints in feminism.
“[We] are the first generation of young women that came straight after the second wave of feminism… and then you had this third wave of feminism as kicking back against it, and it was a bit like, ‘we’ll do it better, we’ll take it from here’,” says Smith. “I had this idea that feminism was pretty much, you were either a housewife and quite oppressed, or this shoulder-padded businesswoman and had people telling you that you were a terrible mother. It was very much pitched as a battle between women.
“I also remember in the 1990s that ironic sexism in FHM or Loaded, and calling everyone a ‘bird’,” Smith adds. “There was this sense of, ‘if you get your tits out, we’ll interview you as well, we’re still treating you like a person’, and I tried to buy into that, thinking, ‘well, it’s not sexist’. By the time we got to the Noughties, you had these magazines completely devoted to picking apart how women looked. One week they’re too fat, the next week the person is breathing in and they’re too thin.
“The cliché of middle-aged womanhood is that it’s a time when we ‘become invisible’,” Smith writes in her book. “Alas, superpower fans, this does not happen. We are still here, same as always, it’s just that we’re being ignored. Other people are actively choosing not to acknowledge or value us.” She also writes of “the spite that arises when men deem us to have served our purpose and wonder why we are still here”.
The ‘Karen’ problem Misogyny has long been baked into modern society. Intersect it with ageism, however, and Smith has pinpointed a phenomenon that hasn’t been discussed at length.
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Women come to an age where the sexism they encounter is different to the harassment or objectification they’ve experienced before. They find themselves at the receiving end of a different type of criticism after the age of 45. Their opinions and worldviews are demonised, their value seen as irrelevant.
They become invisible. Or worse, they are painted as sour, witchy shrews (indeed, when I’ve written about Leonardo Di Caprio’s preference for girlfriends under 25, some of the more hare-brained Twitter feedback included mentions of my own “jealousy”, as someone “dried up” and “past it”).
Hags also explores the experiences of middle-aged women around beauty, work, mothering, sex, violence, community, unpaid work and power. Whatever side of 40 you are on, it’s a sobering read.
Nowhere is this casual ageism more evident than in the rise of the ‘Karen’, which is by now a cultural shorthand for privileged white women who pop their heads above the parapet. Coined by women of colour, ‘Karen’ is now used to malign any middle-aged woman with dissenting, unpopular ideas.
“In a way, I almost didn’t want to write about the Karen thing in the book because it’s just so contentious,” says Smith. “It’s linked to black women being able to talk about racism and find ways to express issues with white women’s racism. But I realised if I didn’t mention it, it’s just a really big thing. There are men who have latched onto the Karen thing as a quick way of completely putting you down. It’s become a way of saying, ‘oh you’re just this hand-wringing, judgemental shrew’.”
Smith has felt a shift herself in the last five or six years: “Men my age or older speak to women younger than us both as though they are peers, while I am barely there at all,” she writes in Hags. “I struggle to edge into the conversation. I feel small and merely tolerated, as if I have walked in on a discussion not meant for me.
“You can feel a bit silly trying to push your way back in [to the conversation] like, ‘who does she think she is? She thinks she’s still got it. Does she realise we don’t have time for this anymore?’” Smith says now. “I’m not entirely sure how much of this is how people treat me, and how much is me remembering how I used to see older women when I was younger.”
A lot of the time, this sexism comes from younger women, seemingly blithely unaware that this, too, is the fate awaiting their future selves. In fact, Smith dedicates her book to “all the hags, past present and in waiting”.
“One thing I’ve tried to say in the book is that there’s always been this trend towards disrupting relationships across generations, and a kind of preventing women from passing on knowledge in various ways by creating this distrust of older women or disapproval of younger women,” she says.
“In terms of your inner self, you’re the same as you ever were as a woman, it’s just how you’re perceived has changed. And all the prejudices you might have absorbed when you were younger, you realise that maybe when I was looking at older women, they actually just felt the same way I did all along. I think when you’re younger, you’re not preparing yourself for what it’s going to be like, being middle-aged.”
Far from approaching a financial, societal or physical purple patch, middle-aged women find themselves past their earning peak, moving headlong into care crises, or looking at much smaller pension pots than their male counterparts. There is, on reflection, much for middle-aged women to be discontented about.
Unpaid labour “You see these headlines that say things like, ‘women’s pensions won’t be equal to men for another 100 years’, and that’s really shocking to me, but completely accepted as normal,” she says. “So much of it is based on women’s unpaid labour and taking time out to do lots of things that support the economy, but that aren’t fully taken into account.”
The unease between older and younger women is also evident on social media. As Smith writes: “Twitter is awash with invective regarding the sins of the sagging woman: ‘the biggest haters on social media are saggy middle-aged women with Bible verses in their bios and awful haircuts’; ‘Calm your saggy tits, Karen’; ‘Middle-aged women are… all angry at the world because their faces have gone saggy’.”
“There’s this expectation that you stay looking young and that you’re doing all this work to do that, and if you do get it wrong or you’re not good at it, you get mocked for it, because it’s a kind of vanity, or mutton-dressed-as-lamb,” Smith says.
“It’s really complicated — I think we women have found more ways to resist being sidelined in terms of our presence in public life, but at the same time, there’s a very youth-obsessed culture there that is always telling us we can be easily replaced.”
As to what Smith would like to see happen next, not just for her generation but for the hags-in-waiting? “I’d love to see more intergenerational solidarity in feminism, and more working with younger women and working together,” she says. “I’d love to see better representation of older women in stories and on screen, and deal with issues to do with pay and elder care and childcare and inequality in a cross-generational way, that would really change the life paths of so many women.”
